Er, we've already done this once. We only deleted users who had never logged in so they couldn't own any nodes so there would be no errors generated. It was done mostly to free up the names and slightly reduce clutter. It certainly wasn't done out of any concern for disk space, table efficiency, etc. We don't link nodes to owner via username, we do it on user ID number; so we could have renamed the users rather than delete them but there isn't much point in that.

Unfortunately, we were wrong. "Faqmonk" has never logged in and yet owns the Perl FAQ nodes. Note that this does not generate any server errors (much less a flood), but rather just an ugly link in the "by" field of those nodes. See How do I do (anything)? for an example. Prior to some changes, it simply resulted in an "empty" link.

And "faqmonk" still exists in the tomb and we just need to resurrect him. The resurrection code had some bugs in it so I'm just waiting for the person who was fixing that code to test it on faqmonk.

We'll do this purge again occasionally. We'll probably also purge accounts that have logged in but never created nodes and haven't logged in for a really, really long time. There was some consideration to e-mailing a warning before deleting, and we'll consider it again the next time.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")